Yahoo!

[Anne Callery]

On Tue, 18 Nov 1997, Wilfred Drew <drewwe at MORRISVILLE.EDU> wrote:

> Supposedly Yahoo had librarians doing indexing.  The head of it was 
> a member of this list at one time.  I hope she replies.


Hi -- I think I am the Yahoo! surfer (cataloger) you remember.  I'll try
to answer some of the concerns that were raised here... 

We are still adding a lot of sites to the directory.  See
<http://www.yahoo.com/new/> for each day's new additions, as well as a few
other daily features.  We receive thousands of submissions each week, and
because we want to make sure we look at each one before adding a listing,
it can take a while to process.  It's pretty much the same situation for
change forms.

Re dead links: because Yahoo! contains well over half a million links
(over 730,000 at end of the last quarter, September 30, 1997), it's
difficult to eliminate all dead links as soon as they become inactive. 
Nor would we especially want to anyway, because it's in the nature of web
sites to occasionally go down temporarily, whether for a few minutes or
for a few days. 

We do run periodic scans of the database and check dead links by hand
before deleting them.  Sometimes a site has moved, and we just need to    
change the URL.  We also come across these dead links on our own while
grooming and maintaining categories.  In addition to these methods, we
rely on users to let us know if they come across the dead links first.   

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Anne Callery                Yahoo!               anne at yahoo-inc.com
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